Our brand narrative at all points will be strengthened by superior service levels through regular information, engagement, and self-service options
Sonia Notani, Chief Marketing Officer, IndiaFirst Life Insurance Company Ltd.
We can all unanimously agree that January 2021 looks very different from the January we knew in 2020. Along with the rest of the world, marketers faced unique opportunities triggered by the pandemic. The impact of COVID-19 caused an unprecedented dependence on digital mediums -overall screen time went up, OTT platforms exploded, multi-lingual content saw a new lease of life and how we share and consume content changed forever. Irrespective of age and demographics, the lockdown accelerated digital adoption and consumers moved from information and influence to purchase decisions. These shifts in consumer behaviour, made marketers re-think and re-evaluate their strategy.
As the CMO, my vision for IndiaFirst Life remains consistent – to build a valued brand, this is enriched by a line-up of beneficial products, strengthened consumer awareness and thoughtful customer experiences, while fostering relationships with stakeholders. However, given the impact of the pandemic, the way we approach the vision to bring it to fruition has its foundation in the following three pillars.
Brand Creation
Focus on Building a Truly Trusted Brand: The most important starting point to achieve our vision has been our relentless focus on building a trusted brand. While the category narrative in insurance constantly plays on ‘fear’, we simply decided to, ‘Talk Life, Not death’. From here was born a brand statement that focusses on the ‘Certainties’ of life. This proposition has been taken to next level in January 2021 in our latest campaign – ‘Stress Ko Karo Kill, IndiaFirst Life and Chill – Yehtoh Certain Hai!’that provides an interesting take on the fact that safeguarding our family’s needs, does not have to come at the cost of our own peace of mind. Video content and multi-lingual platforms will play a big role in how we reach out to our audience. Our brand narrative at all points will be strengthened by superior service levels through regular information, engagement, and self-service options.
Demanding Excellence Through Thought Leadership: At IndiaFirst Life, we have always believed in forthright substance. Our leadership embodies the dictum of ‘Insurance for All’ and ensures adequate content, information and context is provided for all customers. We have seen consumers keen to understand more about protection and assurance. The medium is no more restricted to print and long-form content. Our leadership team has transitioned to webinars and podcasts that address consumer queries, provide information and access to direct intelligence. We see 2021 being a year of direct conversations across digital and voice apart from continued print presence.
Brand Awareness
Emphasis on Smart Content: Simple and hyper-personalized content is gaining precedence. Today, with digital mediums providing direct access, we can leverage the latest in machine learning and artificial intelligence(AI) enabling relevant and personalised content to our target audience. Also, the target audience is now more nuanced and widespread. Hence, there exists an opportunity for creating smart, multi-lingual content and building responsiveness into the communication, making it more interactive and effective.
Voice optimization: The widespread digital adoption, deep regional penetration of telecom, access to the internet; are all factors that have led to new mediums of outreach and connect. Voice is one such medium that is seeing widespread proliferation across classes and masses alike given new age technology keeping pace with the customer adoption. Amazon Echo, Google Home or basic search enabled on voice across platforms opens new possibilities for future of voice technology sans literacy barriers. This is an interesting space that we, at IndiaFirst Life, will be optimizing in the near future.
Brand Experience
Superior Customer Experience: Customer First is at the core of all our business commitments. Superior customer experience is prioritized by ensuring seamless, customer-focused processes that transcend internal company hierarchy and business functions. With our goal to hyper-personalize, we created a matrix of 8 Personas with distinct demographic and psychographic attributes, which further enabled us to create a differentiated communication, share calculator links based on profile and have an engagement strategy for different segments of our customer base. Further, we have also enabled a robust Voice of Customer (VoC) program for targeted feedback and real time service recovery at 11 customer touchpoints across the lifecycle. Customer engagement through personalized, targeted communication, information, and feedback to enable customer delight, loyalty and testimony will be a key focus area in 2021.
Distributor Experience – Regular Connect: Distributors are partners in progress and we traverse the new normal together. We will focus on enhancing the experience of our distributors, equipping them for digital customer outreach. We will continue to provide information, access and enablement for customer education, awareness, engagement, on-boarding and servicing electronically. In 2020, we have organized virtual events, conceptualized ‘e-Sampark’–virtual webinar for customer engagement &education on planning one’s personal finance and also ‘Ghar Baithe Insurance’ for customer outreach and on-boarding. In 2021, we will focus on strengthening our efforts and being their backbone in a bid to help them aide our customers effortlessly.
In a nutshell, 2021, is a year where we consolidate our learnings, channel our agility, and navigate our path based on the changed environment and new opportunities that 2020 presented us with.
